Class Description

Speculative fiction can be many things—a horror, a far-flung dystopia, an alien invasion, a new technology with unintended effects, a faery handbag, a visit to hell! Writers of speculative fiction bend the rules of the world to get at a deeper truth. In this four-week course, we’ll study great works of contemporary speculative fiction from writers such as Paolo Bacigalupi, R. F. Kuang, Kelly Link, Chana Porter, and Rachel Yoder, with a focus on craft concepts like world-building, characterization, plot, and commentary. We’ll talk about how to build a story from a character’s relationship to the rules of the world, and we’ll discuss genre tropes and reader expectations, examining how writers subvert or upend those expectations to create something new. By the end of the course, students will conceptualize their own pieces and write their own story setups, building a foundation for a speculative work with feedback from the group and guidance from the instructor. All sessions will be recorded and the recordings made available to registered participants. Instructor bio: Katie M. Flynn is a writer, editor, and educator based in San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Tin House, and Tor.com, among other publications. She’s been awarded Colorado Review’s Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction and the Steinbeck Fellowship in Creative Writing. Her first novel, The Companions, came out in March 2020, and opens during a prolonged quarantine where the living can’t go out, but the dead can come in as companions. Her interlinked collection of short stories, Island Rule, is out now from Gallery Books.